To play devil's advocate, induced demand is a good thing - more people getting to go where they want to go. I'm all in favor of HSR but you have to balance the viewpoint - roads are a good thing, in general, they just should be a (much smaller) part of the mix instead of the only answer. Most freight should move by boat and rail, most passengers should move by rail and bus, and roads should be mostly for adhoc trips and deliveries rather than daily commutes.

Why should buses EVER be a part of any solution?

They are terrible, and always will be. It's simple math: buses have to either have long intervals, or be horribly wasteful (and thus too expensive).

At the moment, the most realistic solution is to just wait 10 years for the self-driving cars to mature and then build infrastructure around them.

It'd be a shame if makers of self-driving cars stuck to actual cars and single trips.

Something in between that and buses might be very efficient and practical, especially for things like work commutes, visits to the supermarket and the like. Having say 6 or 8 seats and picking up multiple parties who are heading in the same direction or going to roughly the same destination. It would likely be quicker than waiting for a single trip car and definitely cheaper. Additionally it would likely reduce the number of autonomous vehicles on the road and use less resources.

That just sounds like busses with extra steps :)

The difference is busses travel fixed routes and are not on-demand.

Is that the most realistic? Because I don't think they're ever going to get L5 automation to work.

What Waymo et al have now probably is sufficient for a "public transport" role, given the fixed service area and high density enabling investment in mapping infrastructure with manual fixes and local heuristics.

Erm. Waymo exists already. It's not perfect, but it works. You can get a ride in an actual human-free taxi in SF.

Extending Waymo to handle ALL possible situations autonomously (you put in "New York" in the address field and the car drives you there from Seattle) is probably a too big ask, but working within a pre-mapped area on semi-fixed routes seems plausible.

I fucking hate that argument.

Induced demand is a sign of success: it allows more people to move comfortably between points, and it increases the overall economic activity by inducing more trips.

The only reasonable part of that argument is that lane expansion doesn't increase the average _speed_. And this is indeed true. Instead of lane expansion we ideally should just increase the interconnectivity by building new roads.

In the case of the Puget Sound, I-605 that would bypass I-405 bottleneck is sorely needed.